Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917 – 1977) was an American voting rights activist and community organizer whose booming voice and unwavering moral authority galvanized the civil rights struggle in the Mississippi Delta. The youngest of twenty children of sharecroppers, Hamer picked cotton from age six.

After attempting to register to vote in 1962, she was fired from her plantation job and shot at by night riders. In 1963, after attending a voter registration workshop, she was arrested and sustained permanent kidney damage and blindness in one eye from a savage beating by white police officers in Winona, Mississippi. Unbroken, Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964, delivering televised testimony at the Democratic National Convention that moved Americans to tears and forced national recognition of Southern Black voter suppression.